Reticence paints serene natural scenes with hyper-surreal colors and effervescent textures, all with just the sound of his guitar.

Available through Reverb Worship digitally and on CD, River Moves Though Snow finds Reticence (AKA Aaron Riverwood) creating layers of wandering guitar that dance around rippling echoes and pockets of space. Throughout the album’s eight instrumental songs, Riverwood relishes each and every reverberated note, paying close attention to how they fade and decayed into silence. It’s almost as if he is using time itself as an instrument here.

Each track features electric guitar (with the occasional acoustic) being fed through an array of effects, creating chilled alien dreamscapes. This extensive use of knob turning and pedal smashing while venturing out into space via his solo fretboard makes this album reminiscent of the work of Matt Valentine (especially his solo material).

Riverwood’s guitar playing is abstract and expansive, yet intricate and exact, all while still focusing on tone and mood. It intertwines around itself like a fractal, and yet it also stretches out and attempts to head into a variety of different directions, like the sprawling branches of a lightning bolt. This approach coupled with the artist’s spatial appreciation, is an example of a perfect marriage between the styles of guitarists like Jerry Garcia and John Fahey—which are two oftentimes disparate and combative schools of thought.

From the homage/reimagining of Nick Drake’s “Know,” to the cosmic journey that is the heady “Flowers of the Void,” River Moves Though Snow is a meditative stream of guitar consciousness that will easily pull you deep into its current.

-KH

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